Twitter For Bloggers: How To Use Twitter To Grow & Monetize Your Blog [Ep. 60]
Curious how to use Twitter to grow and monetize your blogging business?
Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be focusing on all things Twitter for bloggers to help you successfully master the platform.
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:
- The benefits of Twitter for blogging
- Ways to use Twitter to grow your visibility
- How to use Twitter to make money blogging
- How to get your Tweets seen
- Twitter chats for bloggers
- And more!
Our special guest for this episode is Nicolette Orlemans of CultureTrav who will be sharing all of the above and more.
Note: This episode on how to use Twitter as a blogger contains affiliate links to trusted partners!
Twitter For Bloggers [Podcast Episode Audio]
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Free Travel Blogger Resource Library
To help you really jumpstart your blogging success, I’ve added 45+ blogging resources like printables, video tutorials, and workbooks into a FREE resource library for travel bloggers.
These resources are meant to help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and with less overwhelm!
Grow On Twitter With These Helpful Tools
InShot. One of the many tools you can use to create and edit viral social media videos.
TweetDeck. One of many tools you can use to pre-schedule your Tweets.
Twitter Analytics. This tool is built-in to Twitter, and allows you analyze your Twitter strategy to see what is working — and what isn’t — so you can adjust as needed.
Twitter For Bloggers Guide [Episode Transcript]
*Note: This is the edited down and paraphrased version of the episode. For the full episode, listen to the audio version linked above.
While TikTok and Instagram seem to be all the rage when it comes to social media, there is another platform that can seriously help you get results: Twitter.
In fact, Twitter can not only help you gain visibility, connect with potential collaborators, work with brands, get featured in the media, and land opportunities, but it can also help you monetize your travel blog.
Want to know how?
Then you’re in luck, as our special guest for this episode, social media strategy consultant and community building expert Nicolette Orlemans, will breaking down how bloggers can strategically use Twitter to grow.
Free Resources For Content Creators
But first, before we dive into this episode on how to grow your Twitter, I want to direct your attention to the show notes, where I’ve shared a link to my free Travel Blogger Resource Library.
Or, if you’re in the US or Canada, you can text the word “blogger” to 1-833-818-0342 to have it sent to you by text message. Again, you can text the word “blogger” to 1-833-818-0342.
Inside you’ll snag access to 45+ resources from cheat sheets to workbooks to workshops to video tutorials that can help truly turn your blog into a profitable business.
I’m all about implementation and I really want to make sure you don’t just listen to the episode and forget about it, but that you actually use what I share to make your blogging life easier.
Feel free to even pause this episode to go grab those resources. You back? Then let’s dive in!
1. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your tips! To start, can you tell us more about yourself, your business, and how you got into Twitter?
My name is Nicolette and I’m a social media strategy consultant. I’ve worked on social media across different industries for ecommerce and healthcare and also for large global tech firms.
In my spare time, I love connecting with travel enthusiasts, bloggers, and creatives through my own online community called CultureTrav — which actually started on Twitter, so that’s how I got into Twitter.
And a fun fact about me is that I was born and raised in a multilingual household in the Netherlands with a Polish mom and a Dutch dad, but I have lived in the USA nearly half my life now and I’ve always traveled a lot. That’s how my passion for travel started.
2. Okay so explain Twitter to me. Why should a travel blogger get on Twitter? What are the benefits of using Twitter?
Look at it this way:
In addition to having a space to share your content and link back to your blog, Twitter really has that added benefit of being a really great space for finding communities and also for connecting with fellow enthusiasts.
No matter what your blog niche is, you can find dedicated Twitter Spaces and even communities that fit your interests.
In my opinion, the beauty of travel is that it lends itself to lots of open and fun ways of communicating and having conversations, and Twitter is a great place to start those conversations from — whether you’re a foodie looking to connect with other people or you love to talk about slow travel and more off the beaten path destinations or you simply want to get recommendations from a local.
3. Now, of course, bloggers are always trying to figure out how to actually monetize their brands. How can Twitter help bloggers grow their revenue?
I think there are different ways to approach monetizing your content.
As I’d mentioned before I created my community back in 2014 right on Twitter. This is when I started hosting my own travel-focused Twitter Chat and I would often invite guest hosts.
Occasionally, these hosts were associated with travel brands or smaller tourism boards that I felt would be a good fit in terms of being of interest to the people in our community.
For example, we worked with a brand called Royal Robbins to highlight adventure travel and hiking — as well as outdoor gear, which the brand sells. Working with them, we were able to host a giveaway during the Twitter Chat to reward one chatter with a Royal Robbins gift card while also giving them exposure.
Basically, realize you can monetize your blog on Twitter through brand collaborations and sponsorships.
Another idea:
My travel community was the inspiration for my own product, Travel Banter, which is a conversation starter card game. I launched that on Kickstarter and it was largely backed by my own travel community and was funded within 24 hours, so that was amazing.
And the game itself is essentially the in-person version of what my Twitter Chat would be where people can talk about travel and dive deeper into how to get to know local culture.
4. Let’s backtrack for a bit. For someone who is brand new to Twitter, what are some best practices for setting up your account and profile?
I love to think of Twitter as any other networking tool, but you get an opportunity to have a little bit of fun with it because you can add a lot of personality and your blog brand can really come through in many different ways.
It’s definitely less formal than LinkedIn, but it allows you to share a bit more about yourself. So a few tips:
-Make sure to fill out your bio and you use relevant hashtags in there so that people can also find you and understand more about you. You can add anything from an emoji that you love to a link to your opt-in freebies page to grow your email list. This guide can help you understand how to create opt-in freebies for your blog if this concept is new to you.
-Also include a high resolution profile picture of yourself traveling.
-Have fun with the header image, which is another opportunity to add photos and show off who you are and what you do.
5. You have such an engaged audience on Twitter, so I’m really curious how you come up with your content ideas and if you create a social media content plan for your Twitter?
In my mind, a lot of it actually comes down to being engaging and also having conversations with other people — which is a great way to enjoy social media.
Of course, you want to promote your blog posts and create your own conversations, but I think you want to balance it with retweeting and replying to other people. It’s very much a reciprocating type of vibe on Twitter, and it’s a way to show support for other creatives.
It’s funny, because while I work on social strategy 24/7 for work, I’m a bit looser with my own content planning and assess things on a weekly basis.
That being said, I do recommend developing an editorial calendar for yourself and looking at relevant holidays that are coming up, trending topics, and important moments that you may want to lean into.
And an editorial calendar can really be a great way to do that because you’ll know what’s coming up in terms of holidays and cultural moments. You’ll be able to really think about how you can align your content with the ones that fit your blog brand and share something interesting to add to the conversation.
For example, I was recently looking at trending hashtags to see if there were any conversations I could contribute to in real-time, and I noticed it was National Park Week. Many travel bloggers were actually talking about it and celebrating it with their own pictures or just chiming in about past national park trips.
So I think that’s a way to really naturally tap into a moment with the content that you already have.
6. One thing I’ve seen you do really well is harness the power of Twitter Chats. Can you share a bit more about what a Twitter Chat is, why you started yours, and the pros/cons of running one?
Think of a Twitter Chat as a live conversation — kind of a Q&A — around a specific topic that’s being discussed with a unifying hashtag.
For example, let’s say that we have a weekly Twitter Chat and it’s focused on outdoor adventure, and our hashtag is #OutdoorChat. So for the for the weekly topics, we’d ask questions related to that — anything from sharing about past travel adventures to memorable hikes you’ve been on to your favorite photo moments outdoors and more.
In my opinion, it’s really about finding the niche and the conversation topic that you are passionate about and that you think will very much resonate with the community that you have or that you’re looking to build.
I started my Twitter Chat as a way to connect with travelers on a deeper level to talk about local culture; exploring cultural immersion and things like languages and even sometimes uncomfortable conversations around culture shock or cultural appropriation.
Even though there are many other great Twitter Chats that cover travel, I was seeking to do something that was a little bit more in the cultural space about getting to understand the places that we’re visiting that are either very different from our own or where we can find similarities despite being different.
In terms of the pros and cons of running a Twitter Chat, the biggest pro for me has been community; I love connecting with people and having genuine conversations online and then meeting people offline. Also, hearing travel stories and tips is a pro.
In terms of cons, it’s tricky to find a time for people to join a chat sometimes, especially as time zones can be an issue. You’ll want to find creative ways to still connect with your community even outside of chat time.
7. For anyone else who may want to start a Twitter Chat, what are the first steps they should take?
A huge part of this is about identifying your “why”; why are you looking to to do something and how you can create value by doing it?
And what I mean by creating value is thinking about the audience you are trying to speak to and how to engage your audience. For instance, you can get them involved in the launch of the chat as well as the planning of the weekly chat questions.
This also includes thinking about the format and cadence of your Twitter Chat. Is it bi-weekly or monthly? Is it an hour long or does it have an all-day format? By the way, the latter can be great when you’re dealing with different time zones.
You also want to do hashtag research. Make sure you’re not using a hashtag that already exists, and really choose something that reflects your specific niche.
8. Okay, so aside from Twitter Chats, what are your favorite Twitter features? Do you use Twitter Lists, Twitter Spaces, or anything else?
I really love Twitter Lists! I think they’re a great great way to see what your community members, friends, or other travel bloggers are up to — and maybe even retweet them.
You can even create curated lists of bloggers in your niche whose content you love to quickly and easily find content to share.
You can also use Twitter Lists for social listening, whether you create lists of brands you’d like to work with (so you can interact with them, an important step when pitching brands), potential customers, people you may want to collaborate with to grow your blog, etc.
9. Aside from using hashtags, are there other things creators can do to help their Tweets get seen by more people?
Hashtags are huge, though another idea is to tag people that you’re already supporting and engaging with in photos and tweets.
Also, lean into conversations that have already happened or that are happening in real time.
Ultimately, though it’s all about engaging in a natural way. Think about retweeting, commenting, clicking their links, and more. There is a lot of genuine reciprocity on Twitter, so this will help you with your own engagement, as well.
10. What are some of the top strategies you’ve used to grow on Twitter?
Twitter engagement is important. So for me, it comes down to either engaging in conversations via other Twitter Chats my own, leaning into hashtags, and thinking about ways to share about a trending topic.
Again, this is where a content calendar can come in handy, especially if you want to share your own content.
For instance, maybe you’ve done a really awesome roundup post on the top national parks in the US that you’ve been to, and you can share it during National Park Week.
Share your content on Twitter, but also do a lot of social listening. Moreover, follow conversations, hashtags, and keywords then create content based off of that.
11. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom! Before we sign off, can you let everyone know where they can find you?
- CultureTav Website
- Travel Banter – a card game that helps travelers have engaging conversations on the road
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to use Twitter to grow your blog.
Don’t forget to grab access to my free resource library for bloggers. There are a ton of social media resources in there.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.
Happy blogging!
Grow Your Social Media Channels With These Helpful Past Episodes:
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